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Feminism, Constructivism and Numinous Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Melissa Raphael
Melissa Raphael
Affiliation:
Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education, PO Box 220, The Park, Cheltenham GL50 2QF
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Abstract

This article brings together constructivist epistemology and feminist study of religion to provide phenomenological evidence that numinous consciousness is not the immediate, sui generis essence of religious experience that Rudolf Otto believed it to be. Whilst there are certain peculiarities in the Ottonian scheme that might make numinous consciousness unusually resistant to conceptual and ideological mediation, it can be shown that androcentric epistemological and axiological structures make the experience intelligible and worthy of accommodation within a given patriarchal religious tradition. By contrast, contemporary gynocentric spiritualities in which women celebrate their psychobiological difference as itself a necessary medium of religious experience, have no interest in protecting the holy from the limitations of its immanence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , December 1994 , pp. 511 - 526
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 ‘Language, Epistemology and Mysticism’ in Katz, S. (ed.), Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (London: Sheldon Press, 1978). Although Katz does not discuss the numinous as such, much of his argument is relevant to the present article since Otto considered that mystical and numinous experience were categorically continuous.Google Scholar

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3 Ibid. p. 41.

4 Ibid. p. 56.

5 Ibid. p. 33.

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9 Ibid. p. 175.

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21 It should not be objected that I am not comparing like with like as The Idea of the Holy is far wider in its reference than biblical monotheism.

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55 The Idea of the Holy, p. 1.

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63 Craighead, , ‘Immanent Mother’, p. 81. Note that calling God ‘Mother’ does not, as in this case, necessarily denote a post-Christian position.Google Scholar

64 Ibid. p. 79.

65 Saiving, ‘Androcentrism in Religious Studies’, p. 197.